As electronic devices such as mobile telephones, that is to say car telephones and ‘mobiles’, cordless telephones, which communicate via a base station connected to the landline network, electronic notebooks and PCs, which contain databases, such as personal telephone directories, appointments diaries, personal address books, task lists and the like, become more and more widespread, there is the increasing problem that a user needs to manage various electronic telephone directories and/or electronic appointments diaries. If a user uses a cordless telephone with an electronic telephone directory at home in his apartment, for example, then the electronic telephone directory primarily stores private telephone numbers, whereas his work mobile primarily stores work telephone numbers. Further telephone directory entries may be stored in the car telephone, and if he/she additionally uses a private mobile telephone or mobile as well, this contains further, private and work telephone numbers. In this context, important telephone numbers are frequently stored in a plurality of communication devices used by the user, while other telephone numbers can be found only in a single one of the personal telephone directories in each case. In addition, the user may also have access to electronic telephone directories in his private and/or workplace PC.
In addition, a lot of mobile telephones operated with a SIM card (subscriber identity module) have the facility to store telephone directory entries either in the memory of the SIM card or in a further memory of the appliance itself. This is the case with the Nokia 9110 Communicator, for example. While the SIM card can hold 125 entries in the case of the current prior art, several 100 to several 1000 entries can be made in the memory area of the Nokia 9110 Communicator, depending on the additional memory used.
Parallel access to the various memory areas or the various electronic telephone directories is currently not possible, which means that a user must either constantly coordinate all his available telephone directories with one another if he wants to have all telephone numbers constantly available, or he needs to search through the individual electronic telephone directories one after the other. The problem described in this case in connection with electronic telephone directories with mobile and cordless telephones also concerns, by way of example, address books, appointments diaries and other databases which are provided in PCs, electronic appointments diaries and planners and the like, however.
DE 196 44 104 C1 discloses a communication device which has a main data memory in a mobile telephone and has a call number memory in a voice dialing unit connected to the mobile telephone by means of a cable. In this context, the main data memory serves as a database for a personal telephone directory, while the call number memory stores some of the data recorded in the personal telephone directory, which data can be used to access the telephone directory entries in order to select a stored telephone number. In this case, the main data memory has access to the call number memory and is able to change and/or add to entered data in order to ensure that the telephone numbers stored in the main data memory can be reliably accessed using the call number memory.
It is not necessary to search through the two interconnected memories simultaneously in this case, since the call number memory does not represent another personal telephone directory, but rather only a data list which stores for telephone directory entries in the main data memory the name of the entry and the memory location.
Further, although speech recognition becomes more and more popular for controlling electronic devices like mobile telephones. PCs, electronic appointments diaries and planners and the like, user interfaces using speech recognition are usually only used in systems having the databases stored in the same device.
If speech control via communication links is today done, then it is done by transferring the voice stream via the communication link, which needs a rather high data rate and also a separate voice link. Examples are automatic voice recognition systems used in the telephone network for customer inquiry.